The Physician's Apprentice
by Iellix
Summary: My master is a mistress--a woman. The lady physician of Acre, married to an Englishman. One-shot


I've been bitten by the one-shot bug. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at Djaq, Will, and their relationship through the eyes of another person. In this case, it's through the eyes of Djaq's apprentice—who doesn't quite know what to make of his or her master. (I have no idea if the narrator is male or female. Really.)

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, even though they're never actually named. I do own the narrator, but that hardly seems compensatory.

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o…o

My master is a mistress.

A lady physician—not all that unusual, for many women have taken up medicine to help the ill and injured who pass through here. But my master is so unlike most women. She knows much of battlefield injuries, how to stitch gaping wounds and determine if an injury is too deep to be survived, the appropriate way to amputate an infected limb, and all manner of medicines and poisons to assist her along the way—and yet she knows little of midwifery, of children, babies, mothers, and childbirth, nor does she wish to learn.

My master does not pick and choose her patients, does not treat her countrymen first before taking the injured Crusaders; instead, she sees first those who are the worst hurt, regardless of who they are or where they come from. At first I did not know what to make of this—who was she, to take others before her own kin? But they are still people, still human just as we are—they are _ahl al-Kitâb,_ and we must care for them as our own. Just because _they_ feel the need to come in and invade our homeland does not mean that we have the obligation—or, indeed, the _right—_to treat them just as poorly.

She speaks to them in their own tongue—an awful jarring tumble of consonants with no sweet, flowing rhythm as has our language—and speaks softly and soothingly. An injured man is a frightened man, she says, and it is up to the physician to do everything in his or her power to make him feel comfortable and at ease.

She wears no veil in front of me, nor in front of her patients, showing her short hair and determined face and hard black eyes to every man who passes through her care. What is the point, she asks, to ruin perfectly good silks with blood and bile, simply for the sake of mild modesty? Allah wishes women to be modest, she goes on, but more than that He wishes for His followers to do good by one another. She can hardly be expected to be elbow-deep in a belly wound in her physician's workshop, _and_ maintain her veil, can she?

And I know she is right.

She is good at what she does, my master. The best I have ever seen. This is why my father sent me to be apprenticed to her, the lady physician of Acre. She knows by heart every symptom of every disease known to man, and possibly a few unknown—she has learned many a small trick in her travels, such as treating mushroom poisoning with the deadly nightshade, that nobody here would have thought to try but that she learned elsewhere. Just because a people live differently than you do, and are perhaps a little less learned than you are, does not mean that their methods and practices have no merit. Keep your mind open, she tells me, and your hands skilled.

Skilled hands…

I watch her as she carefully binds the broken leg of another Crusader, talking to him in halted, uncertain words—yet another language of these Europeans, this one less jarring and smoother. I do not understand it, but it is not unpleasant to listen to. She is gentle, but steady and confident, as if she has done this a thousand times before and in fact she probably _has_ done this a thousand times before. She says something to the man, nods, and then turns to me.

"_Daris,_ this man says he has pain—what would you suggest?" She asks, testing my knowledge.

I rattle off a whole list of possibilities, but I suggest that a tincture of Indian poppies would be most effective at curing his pain and calming him down. She nods at me with a smile in her eyes, satisfied with my answer, and goes back to work.

My master wears jewellery while she works, a wholly unusual trait. One is a plain silver ring, which she normally wears on the fourth finger on her left hand. When she is working in open wounds or does not wish to dirty the piece, she removes it and slides it onto a thin leather cord around her neck, along with an old wooden tag that is her only other decoration. The wood is of a type I have never seen before, and there are symbols carved into it—it looks like a moon, or a bow and arrow, or it might be both together.

I asked her once, while we were quietly labelling jars of herbs and medicine, what those symbols meant. Her face turned soft, then, as I had never seen it before, and she traced her fingers over the tag.

"It is… an identification," she replied eventually, as if she was trying to come up with the right words. "There were many of us, and any who wore these tags were recognized as a member of our…" and then she trailed off again, my eloquent master at a loss for words for the first time.

"Family?" I asked.

"Yes… yes, that is what we were. What we _are._ A family." She spoke not to me, but to the air in front of her, voicing her thoughts out loud. "Back to work with you," she said then, as she came out of her trance and continued writing.

Another time, I asked her why she always wore that ring, such a simple piece that she obviously loved very much. She looked at it, as if noticing it for the first time, and told me that it was an English tradition in marriage that she didn't quite understand, but that she did anyway because her husband had insisted. I didn't understand why she, or her husband, would partake in such an unusual thing, until one day I saw her husband.

He was English.

He was tall and lanky, all arms and legs, with ghostly pale flesh and terrifying light eyes that looked like they could see through absolutely anything. And he was _English._

I had no idea.

Why would such a woman of high status, a woman of such great respect, have allowed herself promised to a filthy European? She could have had any man in Acre that she wanted, surely, so why did she marry the Englishman? Was she promised to him? And if she _was—_whose stupid idea was that, and why did she not resist? I cannot see her as the type simply to submit to somebody else's decisions about her life, particularly when I have seen the ferociousness with which she fights for the life of a patient, unwilling to let him die before she feels the time has come. I did not understand it at all, but I did not wish to disrespect my master by asking, so I kept my mouth closed.

For a long time, I watched them, observed them covertly, to see if I could find the answer for myself. After all, that was what science was all about: observation. Only it is very hard to observe when one cannot understand what is being said.

My master speaks English to her husband, talking softly in a gentle voice that seems only for him. The whole language sounds different when she speaks it to him, and when he speaks it to her. It sounds almost… _poetic._ Gone are the jarring syllables that do not fit a proper pattern, and gone are the terrible consonants that sounds like horses talking. In their place are lilting purrs, private whispers. It is a language all their own, for just the two of them.

Her husband is not offended that his wife refuses to wear a veil, except in the Mosque where she is required to do so. He seems almost pleased at her tendency to speak out and take charge of any situation, and he follows her commands as if this were the natural order of things. Nor does he care that she sees men, naked men, all the time as a part of her work—certainly it is an occupational hazard, but even the most understanding husband would surely be incensed by this, and yet he is not. He strokes her hair, touches her face, holds her hand, kisses her cheek—all in public, where anybody and everybody can look on them and sneer, and he pays no attention to the scorn of those who see. All of this open affection seems almost welcome, and she makes no attempts to stop him or scold him or remind him what he should and should not do in public.

The Englishman is as odd as my master.

And then one day I heard it, quietly, as she spoke with him. I could not be certain I heard it correctly, except that she said it again later. She called him _habibi,_ "my love", and said it in the tongue of her people so that anybody walking by or overhearing would hear the word and know what it meant—know what she thinks of him.

Know that she loves him.

I suppose it was then that I understood. My master was not promised to the Englishman, nor did she wed him against her will. She told me that once, some years ago, they were comrades in arms, friends. That she chose him, and he chose her—for love, and for no other reason. And then she cuffed me about the head and told me to stop asking personal questions.

I know, now.

My master is a mistress—a woman. The lady physician of Acre.

She is strong and skilled and kind. I have seen my master coolly and quickly clean and medicate and stitch wounds that have gone untended for days, wounds that have grown black and green and smell of rotting meat, without so much as batting an eye while all around her the toughest soldiers are ill from the sight and smell. She has waded into the bloodied sands of battlefields, looking for survivors who can be treated. She has coldly dispatched of European Crusaders who threaten her home one minute, and the next minute picked the men up and treated their wounds—wounds she herself inflicted—rather than let them die. I have seen my master hold the hand of a dying man, who was delirious with fever and believed her to be his wife; she let him believe it, told him that she loved him, kissed his forehead, and clutched his hand until the breath left him, let him die in peace.

My master is odd. She does precisely what she believes is right at the expense of social norms—the consequences be damned. She has lived in Europe and does not harbour the same distaste for the people as do most. My master is practical and passionate; she is gentle when the time calls for it, and firm when needed.

My master loves her Englishman. When she is with him, she is no longer the sensible, firm, no-nonsense physician who teaches her apprentice and tends the injuries of soldiers; she is, instead, the wife of an English carpenter, soft-spoken and sweet and almost giddy. Even though I do not know what they say to one another, I know that there are no walls between them. No secrets. Just them, and their private language, all alone in their own little world.

I believe that this is the person my master truly is, for, when she is not my master—when she is not making me learn something new or saving another life, or the warrior who defends her home—she is first a woman.

That is simply who she is.

o…o

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Hm, well—that's different, isn't it? I'm pleasantly surprised how this story came out. Not bad for a piece written to kill time while I was at my brother's dentist appointment! _Home Fires_ will be updated as scheduled, but I just wanted to post this.

A couple of brief clarifications before I bugger off. _ahl al-Kitâb_ means "People of the Book" or "People of the Holy Book" and refers to people who worship the same god as the Muslims do—other Muslims, Jews, and Christians. They are to be treated with the same respect as their own people. (Seriously.) _Daris_ just means "student," since I didn't really feel it was appropriate to give the narrator a name.

Feedback is love, but readers are more love.


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